The Holy Trinity of Conversion Tracking

The Three Elements You Need to Know Exactly Where Your Sales Are Coming From

If you Google the definition of the word “empirical“, you’ll find a simple phrase that captures the heartbeat of our agency: “based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic”.

See, we believe that everything we do, for ourselves and for our clients, should be data-driven. It sounds basic; it sounds obvious; but one of the things we’ve noticed in our account audits and heard from clients that have previously worked with other agencies is that this is not a priority in the industry.

Here’s how we know this. One of the first questions we ask prospective clients, and the question we’ll pose to you as well, is this:

Do you know where your sales are coming from?

Almost 9 times out of 10, we receive a negative answer. This is a huge problem.

If you don’t have an answer to this, you are playing a guessing game with extremely high stakes. Even if your business or your campaigns are doing well right now, in the future, if things change, you will have no idea what went wrong or how to fix it. You’re also settling for less revenue. If you did know exactly where your sales were coming from, you could optimize that channel and bring in more sales.

Have you ever seen the movie Fred Claus, with Vince Vaughn? It’s a kids’ Christmas flick with bad Rotten Tomatoes reviews, but the end scene makes a good marketing example: Fred, the main character (Santa’s brother) is flying Santa’s sleigh with the help of a sophisticated GPS and wireless comms. The elves at the North Pole are telling him exactly which houses to hit, the best route to get there, and where to go next, but suddenly the GPS and comms are turned off. Fred is gaining speed above the clouds, but he starts to panic because he is flying blind. He has no idea where the houses are below him, because he can’t see anything; he doesn’t know where to go next, because he doesn’t have a GPS or a map.

When you’re not tracking conversions – if you don’t know where your sales are coming from – you’re essentially flying blind. You’re not seeing data you need to be seeing, and you have no idea what to do to optimize your sales.

And while you may not run the risk of ruining Christmas for millions, the risk of losing business is real, and significant. We don’t want that for you.

What’s the solution?

While the bad news is that not having conversion tracking seems to be a widespread issue with heavy consequences, the good news is that getting the right tracking in place isn’t hard. In the next few weeks, we’ll be presenting video tutorials on three aspects of conversion tracking we believe are absolutely critical to your success:

1. Form Submissions

2. Phone Calls

3. Gclid

If you learn how to implement these three straightforward components, your campaigns’ performance is going to bring in a much higher ROI. So how do you track form submissions? What’s the most effective way to track phone calls? What even is a Gclid?

We’re going to share what we know with you in our AdNerds video series. We’ll be releasing one video and one blog each week for the rest of January that’s going to present a step-by-step tutorial on each topic. Let this be your marketing Bible – learn it, and learn it well, because we aren’t even exaggerating when we say conversion tracking is likely the key difference between success and failure!